Left and Solidarity Bloc

The Left and Solidarity Bloc, ordinarily the Bloc, is the cooperative left party of the United Kingdom of America holding 48 of 460 seats in the House of Commons after more than doubling at the general election of 7 September 2028, which took it past the Greens and the Liberal Federal Democrats and ended its tenure as the smallest of the Realm’s six federal parties. It is also the oldest of the six after the Conservative and Crown Union, a fact its size conceals: it has contested federal elections since 1912, and until September 2028 it had never been in a federal government, though it has held office in polity coalitions in the upper Midwest.

Its distinguishing commitment is to common ownership pursued through cooperatives, municipal enterprise and chartered public trusts rather than through the state. The Bloc regards nationalisation as the wrong instrument for the right end, arguing that an industry owned by a ministry is owned by whoever wins the next election, while an industry owned by the people who work in it or draw on it is owned by them permanently. This is why the party grew out of the cooperative movement rather than the trade unions, and why it has never merged with the Labour and Social Democratic Party, which took the industrial and union tradition and the ambition to govern with it.

It is alone among the parties of the left in the Realm in having no position on the monarchy. The Bloc has never adopted a republican clause, never campaigned against the Crown, and answers the question when asked by observing that the Crown is not what stands between a tenant and a share in the building. Its opponents call the position evasive and its members call it a matter of priority.

The Bloc’s affiliated cooperative federations and tenant unions are the applicants in the case now before the Royal American Supreme Court seeking to extend the enforceable duties of the American Rights Act to income security, which is the largest constitutional question in the Realm and the work of one of its smallest parties.

The general election of 2028 made the Bloc, for the first time in its history, a party that matters to the arithmetic. It fought the general election on two words, “Count them”, the demand that the four million people of the Territory of Loreto be enumerated and enfranchised, and it took more city seats than it had ever held. Its leader, Signe Halvorsen, proposed the man who became Prime Minister, and the party now holds two seats in a Cabinet, the Federation, which has charge of the count it demanded, and Agriculture.

Name

The name is a historical survival. The Left and Solidarity Bloc was, at its formation in 1912, an actual bloc: an electoral agreement among cooperative federations, municipal reform societies, tenant leagues and several small radical parties, which agreed to contest federal seats under a common label without surrendering their separate organisations. The word described the arrangement exactly.

The arrangement ended in 1948, when the constituent bodies dissolved themselves into a single party. The name did not change, and the party has kept it since out of a sentiment its own officers acknowledge is inconvenient. Voters regularly assume the Bloc is a coalition of parties, journalists regularly describe it as one, and its opponents use the ambiguity to suggest it is unstable or unaccountable. Proposals to rename it have reached the party conference four times and been defeated four times, most recently in 2011.

Solidarity in the name is older than its modern political sense and carried, in 1912, the meaning it had in the cooperative movement: the mutual liability of members for one another’s obligations, which is a technical feature of a cooperative society before it is a slogan.

The party’s emblem shows the word in its old sense: four rounded links, each passing through two others, so that no link can be removed without loosening the whole. The party’s own literature calls them the four forms of common ownership, cooperative, mutual, municipal and trust, and its members call them the chain, which the party’s opponents find an unfortunate word and its members do not.

History

The cooperative movement

The Bloc’s origins lie in the cooperative and municipal tradition of the late nineteenth century rather than in industrial trade unionism. Consumer cooperatives, mutual insurance societies, cooperative creameries and grain elevators, municipal utilities and tenant associations spread through the upper Midwest and the university cities from the 1870s, and reached a density in Wisconsin and Minnesota that made cooperative ownership an ordinary rather than an exotic form of holding property.

The Realm’s law was unusually hospitable to this. The chartered body, incorporated by particular Act with named duties and named privileges, was the founding generation’s characteristic device, and the frontier statutes vesting water and land in public trust had already established that a resource could be held in common without belonging to a ministry. A movement proposing cooperative ownership in the Realm was not proposing a foreign idea; it was proposing more of an existing one.

The movement’s founders were farmers before they were radicals. The Scandinavian, German and Finnish settlers of the upper Midwest brought cooperative habits with them, and they applied them first to the things a farm cannot do alone: the creamery, the grain elevator, the store, the insurance against fire and hail, and the telephone line. By 1900 a Minnesota dairy farmer could sell his milk to a cooperative creamery, buy his feed from a cooperative store, insure his barn with a mutual, borrow from a cooperative credit society and telephone his neighbour on a cooperative exchange, and own a share in all of them. The movement’s politics grew out of the discovery that every one of those institutions depended on decisions taken in New Westminster by people who had never seen one.

Formation, 1912

The cooperative bodies entered federal politics late and reluctantly. The immediate cause was a series of federal decisions on grain grading, freight rates and banking standards that the cooperative federations judged themselves unable to influence through either existing party, and the electoral bloc formed in 1912 to contest a limited number of seats where cooperative membership was dense enough to matter.

Its first convenor was Victor Berger of Milwaukee, the architect of that city’s municipal ownership of its water, gas, harbour and streetcars, who brought into the bloc the municipal reform societies of the Great Lakes cities and a conviction, which the party has kept, that a city could own its utilities as a cooperative owns its creamery. The bloc was never a mass party and did not attempt to become one. Its early parliamentary group numbered in the low teens and concerned itself almost entirely with cooperative law, credit, freight and municipal powers, a specialism its opponents mocked and its members regarded as the point.

The parting with Labour

The Bloc and the Labour and Social Democratic Party grew from different roots and have never merged, though the question has arisen in every generation. The LSDP took the industrial unions, the great strikes and the eight-hour day, and with them the ambition to form governments and legislate. Its heartland is the Commonwealth of Illinois, the cradle of the Realm’s labour movement.

The Bloc’s objection to merger has been consistent and is doctrinal rather than tactical. A party built to win office will use the instrument that office provides, which is the state, and the Bloc holds that the state is the wrong owner. When the Labour Representation Union and the Social Democrats merged in 1921, the bloc was invited to join them and declined; when the LSDP built the welfare settlement from 1929, the Bloc supported the legislation and declined the invitation to join the party that passed it.

The depression years were the bloc’s most influential before 2028. Floyd B. Olson, the leader of the cooperative movement in the Grand Duchy of Minnesota, led it from 1929 until his death in 1936, and argued in the Commons, against Roosevelt’s ministry, that the reform state should be built through cooperatives and municipalities rather than through federal agencies; he lost the argument and won a number of the clauses, and the cooperative and municipal provisions in the farm credit and rural electrification legislation of the 1930s are his. Upton Sinclair, the novelist and campaigner whose movement for production for use had organised the unemployed of California into cooperatives in the depths of the depression, led the bloc from 1936 to 1948 and gave it, for the only time before 2028, a following on the Pacific coast.

Consolidation, 1948

The constituent organisations dissolved into a single party in 1948, after four decades in which the coalition’s internal negotiation had repeatedly cost it seats it might have won. The cooperative federations and tenant unions did not disappear; they became affiliated societies, retaining their own membership, funds and officers while ceding electoral decisions to the party. The arrangement resembles the relationship between a labour party and its unions, with cooperatives in place of unions.

The consolidation’s first leader was Henry A. Wallace, who had been Roosevelt’s minister of agriculture and Labour’s deputy leader until the coalition bargaining of 1944 made his position untenable, and who left Labour in 1946 over the party’s acceptance of the postwar settlement’s limits. Wallace brought to the new party a national name, a farm programme the cooperative belt trusted, and a quarrel with Truman’s Labour that the Bloc kept for a generation after he had forgotten it. He led the party until 1958.

The long minority

The Bloc has returned between fifteen and thirty members at every general election from consolidation until 2028. It never held the balance of power at federal level and was never offered a federal ministry. It repeatedly held office in polity coalitions, principally in Wisconsin and Minnesota and occasionally in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, where its record in municipal enterprise, housing and utility regulation is the substance of its national reputation.

Its leaders in those decades were scholars and organisers rather than politicians. Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister who had spent his life organising tenants and sharecroppers, led it from 1958 to 1966; Michael Harrington, whose study of the Realm’s hidden poverty was read by every minister in Johnson’s government, led it from 1966 until his death in 1989, the longest leadership in its history, and turned it from a farmers’ party with a city wing into a party of tenants, cooperatives and universities. Ruth Aaltonen, a Finnish cooperative organiser from the Upper Peninsula of the Grand Duchy of Michigan, led it from 1989 to 2004, through the LFD decade and the emergency years, and kept it out of the emergency coalition of 2006 on the ground that the Bloc had not been asked and would not have gone. Thomas Medeiros, a tenant organiser from Boston, led it from 2004 to 2019 and began the litigation that became the income-security case.

Harrington’s leadership changed the party more than any other. He came to it from the tenant movements of New York and from a book, his study of the poverty the Realm’s prosperity had hidden, which every minister in Johnson’s government read and which made the Bloc, for a few years in the 1960s, the party that had seen something the others had not. He spent twenty-three years arguing that the cooperative principle applied to the city as well as to the farm: that a tenant could own a share in a building as a farmer owned a share in a creamery, and that the Realm’s poverty was a problem of ownership before it was a problem of income. The argument made the Bloc a party of the cities for the first time since Sinclair, and it divided the party into the two wings it still has.

Medeiros began the income-security litigation, and it was his idea before it was the affiliates’. A tenant organiser from Boston who had spent twenty years watching tenants lose their homes because their incomes had fallen below what any housing duty could reach, he argued that the Rights Act’s four duties were unenforceable in their own terms without a fifth, and he persuaded a tenant union and a cooperative federation to spend a decade proving it. The cooperative wing opposed the strategy from the start, on the ground that an enforceable payment was a transfer and the party existed to replace transfers with stakes, and the argument Medeiros started has never been settled. He stood down in 2019, with the case in preparation and the party on twenty-two seats, and he is the only former leader of the Bloc who attended the eleven days of argument before the Court in the spring of 2028.

Halvorsen and the outsiders, 2019 to 2028

Signe Halvorsen, who represents a Grand Duchy of Minnesota constituency and came into politics through a cooperative federation rather than through the party, won the leadership in 2019. She was the first leader since Olson to come from the cooperative belt itself, and she brought to the party a farmer’s directness and a cooperative manager’s habit of reading every page of every document before she signed it. She had spent twenty years in the cooperative federations of the Minnesota River valley, first as the manager of a creamery and then as the general secretary of a federation of grain and dairy cooperatives, and she entered the Commons in 2015 without ever having held a party office. Her voice on the radio is flat, unhurried and almost entirely without inflection, and the Realm’s broadcasters, who discovered her in the summer of 2028, found that it carried better than any other leader’s because she never said more than she meant.

Her leadership was, until 2028, a leadership of patience. She kept the party’s two wings together through the income-security litigation by declining to choose between them, kept its parliamentary group of twenty-odd members disciplined through a Parliament in which nobody needed their votes, and kept the affiliates, which regarded Parliament as a distraction from their business, paying for a party that could not deliver anything. Her critics inside the party said that she managed decline well. She said that she was waiting.

The Bloc spent the Parliament elected in 2023 as the smallest of the six parties, with twenty-three seats, and when Ana Valdez needed partners in 2025 it was not asked. The coalition formed at Blackjacks in November 2025 was Labour, the LFD and the Greens, and the Bloc sat outside it, where it was not invited and had not asked to be. The party opposed the purchase of Loreto in 2027 on the ground that the Realm was buying a territory without any idea of what it would do with the people who lived there, and spent the following year arguing that the people should be counted, enfranchised and asked.

The election of 2028

The Valdez ministry fell on 26 July 2028 by 229 votes to 230, and the Bloc’s twenty-three members voted with the Opposition. The party fought the general election that followed on a single demand, that the Territory’s people be counted, and on two words, “Count them”, which appeared on every hoarding in the Realm’s cities by the end of August in red and black with nothing else on them but a small photograph of the leader in the corner. Halvorsen told the radio audiences who asked what the Bloc thought the Territory should become that the party did not know, that nobody knew, and that nobody could know until the people had been counted and asked, which was the answer the electorate in the cities wanted to hear.

It gained at the expense of Labour and the Greens over Loreto, having spent the previous Parliament outside Ana Valdez’s coalition of the LSDP, the Liberal Federal Democrats and the Greens, where it was not invited and had not asked. It took twenty-one seats from Labour and eight from the Greens, almost all of them in the university cities and the tenant-dense urban cores, and lost four of its old seats in the cooperative belt to the CCU and AfR, for a net gain of twenty-five and a total of 48, more than double what it had held. It passed the Greens and the LFD and was, for the first time in its history, the fourth party in the Commons.

The agreement, September 2028

The Bloc came back from the election with forty-eight seats and a line its leader delivered on the radio on the Saturday afterwards: that the Bloc had spent three years being told it was not needed and had come back with forty-eight seats and no wish to be needed now. The line was quoted at her for a week, and then she signed the Heads of Agreement anyway.

The reason was arithmetic and Loreto. The Commons the election produced contained exactly two majorities, and the one that did not require a grand coalition of the CCU and Labour required the Bloc. Halvorsen’s view was that the Bloc could not refuse to let four million people be counted, since that was the only thing it had asked for, and the Heads of Agreement committed the ministry to precisely that: a federal enumeration of Loreto within ninety days, a Bill settling the territory’s form within a year of the enumeration’s return, and supply, with no party bound to support any provision of the Bill, only to let it be voted on.

It was Halvorsen who proposed the Prime Minister. On Saturday 9 September she telephoned Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, a twenty-six-year-old hereditary peer who had sat for two years on the Lords select committee on the Territory of Loreto and spoken thirty-one times in the Lords, all thirty-one about the territory, at the bookshop where he worked on Saturdays, and asked whether he would meet the five leaders the next day. She had read all thirty-one speeches, including the one he made on 27 July, the day after the division, and she had concluded that he was the only person in Parliament who had read the whole file. She has said so once, in an interview the week after the commissioning, and has declined to say it again.

Doctrine

Ownership rather than the state

The Bloc’s programme is the extension of common ownership by cooperative, mutual and municipal forms: worker and consumer cooperatives, municipal utilities and housing, mutual credit and insurance, community land trusts, and the conversion of failing private firms to employee ownership rather than their rescue or their liquidation. Its measure of success is the share of the economy held in these forms, not the share of output passing through public spending.

It supports the welfare settlement without regarding it as its own achievement, and its criticism of the LSDP is that a transfer leaves its recipient dependent on the government that pays it, while a share leaves its holder owning something. The distinction is the party’s whole argument and the reason it remained small for a century: it is a difficult thing to campaign on.

The programme has concrete instruments the party has been proposing for decades: a statutory right for employees to buy a firm that is being sold or closed, on terms set by an independent valuer; a federal cooperative credit bank, chartered and owned by its member societies, to finance the purchases; a right for tenants to buy their building collectively when it is sold; and municipal powers to own and operate utilities, broadband and housing without the polity’s leave. None of them has ever passed the Commons, and several have passed polity legislatures where the Bloc has governed.

Housing and tenancy

The tenant wing’s programme is the party’s most developed and, since the 1990s, its most popular. It wants tenants to have a statutory right to organise a building, to bargain collectively with a landlord as a union bargains with an employer, and to buy the building together when it is sold, financed by the cooperative credit bank the party has been proposing since the 1930s. It wants community land trusts empowered to buy land in the cities and hold it permanently out of the market, so that the houses built on it can be sold and resold at prices tied to incomes rather than to the market. And it wants municipalities given the power, which most polities’ law withholds, to build and own housing directly, on the model of the municipal housing that Milwaukee and Minneapolis built under Bloc and Labour councils in the 1920s and 1930s and still own.

The programme is the reason the Bloc took the city seats it took in 2028. The Realm’s cities have had a housing shortage for most of the century, the Valdez ministry’s spending rule made it worse, and the young tenants of the university cities and the urban cores, who had voted Labour and Green for a decade without seeing their rents fall, voted in 2028 for the only party whose answer to the housing question was that they should own the buildings they lived in.

Farm and food

The cooperative wing’s programme is older and narrower. It wants the farm credit system kept cooperative and extended, the grain grading and freight rules that started the bloc in 1912 written with the cooperatives at the table, contract growing regulated so that a farmer who grows for a processor has the bargaining rights of an employee, and the cooperative wholesale federations treated by the federation as what they are, among the largest food distributors in the Realm, rather than as a sentimental survival. Its federal programme has always been the farm programme of the upper Midwest, and its members’ interest in the rest of the party’s business has always been limited.

The Ministry of Agriculture is the department the cooperative wing has wanted the party to hold since 1912, and the agreement’s limits on legislation mean that Halvorsen can change almost nothing in it except by administration. She has used the administration to bring the cooperative federations into the department’s planning for food security, the work that made her ministry ready when the earthquake came.

The chartered trusts

The Bloc is the strongest parliamentary defender of the public trusts over land, water and minerals, and the party most hostile to proposals to convert them into ordinary public corporations or to sell them. It regards the Salt River Project as the most important institution in the Realm’s economic law and the model for what it wants generalised: chartered, locally governed, accountable to those who draw on it, and answerable to no minister.

The position puts it in occasional and uncomfortable agreement with the Conservative and Crown Union, which defends the trusts on the ground that they are local and chartered rather than national and ministerial, and in closer and more comfortable agreement with the Greens, who defend them as trusts. All three parties note the agreement, and the CCU and the Bloc do not enjoy it.

The Crown

The Bloc has no position on the monarchy and has never had one. It adopted no republican clause at its formation, has rejected proposals to adopt one at three conferences, and does not campaign on the constitution. Its stated reasoning is that the Crown neither owns the Realm’s productive property nor obstructs its transfer, and that a party with limited resources should spend them where ownership is actually decided.

This makes it the only party of the left in the Realm without a constitutional position, a fact its critics on the left describe as accommodation and its own members as arithmetic. It also means the Bloc has never been a target of Alternative for the Realm, which has no quarrel with a party that does not contest the Crown. When the abdication of Ernest V came before the Commons on 31 October the Bloc took it with the other five parties, without a division, and said what they said.

Loreto

The Bloc’s position on Loreto is the one Halvorsen gave the radio audiences in August: count the people, enfranchise them, and ask them. The party has no view on what the territory’s constitution should be, because it holds that the people of the territory should have one, and it will judge the Bill settling the territory’s form by whether the people it settles have been counted and asked. Its critics, in AfR and on the CCU’s western benches, call this the absence of a policy dressed as a principle. The Bloc’s answer is that it is the only principle the Realm has not yet tried in Loreto.

Organisation and affiliates

The affiliated societies

The Bloc is a single party and has been since 1948, notwithstanding its name. Its distinguishing feature is the body of affiliated societies: cooperative federations, tenant unions, mutual insurers and municipal and civic associations which are not part of the party but are formally attached to it, send delegates to its conference, and fund a substantial share of its work.

The affiliates are older than the party, larger than it, and considerably less interested in Parliament. Their priorities are their members’ immediate business, and the Bloc’s parliamentary group spends much of its time on matters, cooperative credit rules, grain grading, utility charters, tenancy law, that no other party’s front bench follows closely. The largest of them, the cooperative wholesale federations of the upper Midwest, the Pacific and the northeast, are among the largest food distributors in the Realm, and the tenant unions of the great cities count their members in the hundreds of thousands.

The affiliates also give the Bloc a capacity out of proportion to its size. They employ lawyers, hold long institutional memory, and are able to fund litigation over the years such cases require. That capacity is the origin of the party’s largest achievement.

The Delegate Assembly

The party meets each summer in the Delegate Assembly, at which the individual members’ constituency branches and the affiliated societies send delegates in roughly equal numbers, and which adopts the programme, elects the national committee and, by a rule of 1948, must approve any agreement under which the party enters or supports a government. The leader is elected by a ballot of the individual members, with the affiliates’ members voting through their societies.

The rule on governments had never been used before September 2028. The Assembly was recalled for a special session in the week after the Heads of Agreement were signed, and the affiliates approved the party’s entry into the ministry easily, by a margin larger than the party’s officers had expected; the cooperative federations, which had spent a century being told that their business was too small for Parliament, voted for the chance to run a department of state with something close to enthusiasm.

Headquarters, membership and money

The national office is in Saint Paul, in the Grand Duchy of Minnesota, in the building of the cooperative wholesale federation that housed the bloc’s first secretariat in 1912, and the party keeps an office in New Westminster for its members of Parliament. It has about 50,000 individual members, the fewest of the six parties, and several million more who belong to its affiliated societies and are entitled to vote through them. Its money comes mostly from the affiliates and from members’ subscriptions, and it has never accepted a donation from a company that is not a cooperative, a rule it has kept since 1912 and publishes on every set of accounts.

The party’s paper is The Cooperator, a monthly founded in 1913 by the wholesale federations and published jointly by the party and the affiliates, which carries the Assembly’s proceedings, the parliamentary group’s reports and a great deal of news about creameries.

The income-security case

The case before the Royal American Supreme Court, Amalgamated Tenants and the Cooperative Congress v the Attorney-General, ordinarily the Tenants’ Case, seeks to extend the enforceable duties of the American Rights Act beyond health, housing, schooling and water to include income security. It was brought by a tenant union and a cooperative federation affiliated to the Bloc, it was argued over eleven days in the spring of 2028, and judgment is reserved. It has been in preparation for the better part of a decade.

The argument is that the four recognised duties presuppose a capacity to participate that an income below subsistence removes, so that the existing floor is unenforceable in its own terms without a minimum below which income cannot fall. Every other party has taken a position. The Liberal Federal Democrats and the Greens are broadly sympathetic; the LSDP has declined to state one, which the Bloc regards as the more revealing silence; the CCU opposes the extension; and Alternative for the Realm campaigns for legislation to reverse the doctrine whatever the Court decides.

The case is the clearest illustration of how the Bloc works. It had twenty-three seats when the case was argued and could not carry such a measure through the Commons in any parliament it has ever sat in. It does not need to. The Realm settles the extent of its social minimum by judgment rather than by legislation, and a party with patient affiliates and competent lawyers can reach the question without a majority.

Its own members are not unanimous about the strategy. A section of the cooperative wing argues that an enforceable payment is exactly the dependency the party exists to oppose, and that the Bloc has spent a decade pursuing a transfer when it might have been building stakes. The argument is conducted in public and has not been resolved, and the party’s entry into government has sharpened it: a Bloc minister now sits in a Cabinet whose Chancellor would have to find the money if the Court found for the applicants.

Factions

The Bloc’s arguments run along an old line and a new one.

The old line divides the cooperative wing, the farmers, wholesale federations and mutual insurers of the upper Midwest who built the party, from the tenant wing, the urban tenant unions and university radicals who have been its fastest-growing part since Harrington. The cooperative wing wants stakes, not transfers, and opposes the income-security case; the tenant wing brought the case and regards it as the party’s great work. Halvorsen, who comes from the cooperative belt and leads a party whose growth is in the cities, has managed the division by declining to choose.

The new line was drawn by the election of 2028. The new intake is a Loreto intake. Most of the twenty-nine members who won seats from Labour and the Greens were elected on the single demand that the territory be counted, many of them in their first campaign of any kind, and a good number had joined the party within the year. The party’s officers say, with candour, that they are not sure what the new members believe about anything else: about cooperatives, about the income-security case, about the welfare settlement or about the Crown. The new members have said very little in the Commons, have voted with the party on everything, and have not yet been asked to vote on anything the Bloc’s older members would recognise as the Bloc’s business. The party’s view is that it has two months to find out what it has elected and a Parliament to teach it, and its critics’ view is that a party which has doubled on one demand will halve again when the demand is met.

The Bloc in the polities

The Bloc’s record in government, until September 2028, was entirely in the polities, and it is the substance of the party’s national reputation. It has held office in coalitions in the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin and the Grand Duchy of Minnesota at intervals since the 1930s, usually with Labour and in the cooperative belt’s ministries of agriculture, cooperatives and municipal affairs, and occasionally in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, where its record in municipal enterprise, housing and utility regulation is admired by people who would never vote for it. The municipal utilities of Milwaukee, the cooperative housing of Minneapolis and the public power districts of the upper Midwest were built in large part by Bloc ministers and Bloc councillors, and they are still owned by the people and cities they were built for.

Elsewhere the Bloc is small but persistent, and strongest where the polity’s economy already contains what it proposes. In the Commonwealth of Cascadia, a polity of customer-owned utilities, farm cooperatives and outdoor cooperatives, its programme fits better than it fits almost anywhere, and it is the reason the party takes Cascadia seriously. In the Commonwealth of Illinois it takes votes in parts of Chicago and the university towns, generally at Labour’s expense; in the Province of New Jersey it holds Assembly seats in the plant towns of the south, where the cooperative argument about contract growing has an obvious audience; in the State of Deseret it is small and concentrated in the capital. In the Commonwealth of California, some of its organisers support the polity’s housing obligations but prefer municipal and cooperative ownership to contracts with the major developers, which is the Bloc’s whole housing argument in a sentence.

The Bloc and Labour after 2028

The election left the Bloc and Labour in the same Cabinet and in the worst relations they have had since 1921. The Bloc took twenty-one of Labour’s seats, almost all of them in cities Labour had held for a generation, and it took them by campaigning against the Labour-led government’s handling of Loreto, which Labour’s members regard as an attack on a government the Bloc never helped and on a problem the Bloc never had to solve. Labour’s ministers and the Bloc’s sit together at the Cabinet table under the agreement’s schedule, and both parties’ members say that the Cabinet’s business is conducted with courtesy, which is a word nobody uses about a relationship that is going well.

The old question of merger has not been raised, by either party, for the first time in a century. Labour’s members do not want the Bloc and the Bloc’s new members do not want Labour. The two parties’ affiliated bodies, the unions and the cooperative federations, which have cooperated in the industrial cities for a hundred years without much regard for either party’s quarrels, have quietly continued to.

Electoral support

The Bloc’s vote is concentrated in the upper Midwest cooperative belt, in university cities, and in the tenant-dense cores of the larger urban polities. In Wisconsin it is described as the urban radical and cooperative left and contests Landtag seats alongside the four larger parties. It is present in Minnesota on the same basis, and in Massachusetts Bay, whose multi-party provincial politics and policy-literate campaigning suit it.

It is weakest in the rural south, the interior west and the outer suburbs, and it does not contest large numbers of seats in the constituent monarchies. Until 2028 its federal vote was older than the Greens’ and less metropolitan, and it held a body of support in small towns with cooperative institutions that no other party of the left reaches.

The election of 2028 changed the shape of that support more than its size suggests. The Bloc’s new seats are almost all urban: in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle and the university cities, in the tenant-dense districts where Labour and the Greens had held the young vote for a decade. Its losses were in the cooperative belt, where four of its oldest seats went to the CCU and AfR. The party that was built by farmers is now, by a large margin, a party of city tenants, and the farmers who built it have noticed.

Electoral record

The Bloc’s seats at the general elections since 1992, in a Commons of 460 seats in which a majority is 231:

Leaders

Identity

The party’s colours are red and deep purple: red for the cooperative movement, which used it before any party did, and purple for the tenant leagues of the cities, which adopted it in the 1900s from the banners of the women’s housing campaigns. The emblem of four interlocking links, in red on purple, was adopted at the consolidation of 1948 and has never been redrawn except to thicken the lines. The party’s campaign material is printed in red and black, and the hoardings of 2028 carried nothing else.

The Bloc has no anthem and no standing slogan. It fights each election on the shortest demand it can find, and the demand of 2028, “Count them”, is the most successful it has ever had and, its officers fear, the hardest to follow. The Delegate Assembly ends with the reading of the 1912 declaration of the bloc, which is two paragraphs long and mostly about grain grading.

The party at present

The Bloc holds 48 seats, more than double what it had, and is in government for the first time.

In the Whitlock ministry Halvorsen is Minister of Agriculture, the department the cooperative belt has wanted the party to hold for a century, and Erik Nyberg, the Bloc’s member for a seat in the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin, is minister for the Federation, which has charge of the federal enumeration of Loreto the Heads of Agreement require within ninety days. The party whose one demand was that the territory be counted is therefore running the count, which its opponents regard as a conflict of interest and its members as the obvious arrangement.

Halvorsen is known to the public for one thing she has done in office. When the San Andreas fault ruptured on 2 November and Los Angeles was left with fires in the east of the city, the freeways broken and tens of thousands of people sleeping in shelters, the Ministry of Agriculture ran the food supply to the shelters in the first week through the cooperative wholesale federations, whose warehouses and lorries were in the city before the federal stores could be moved. Halvorsen spent four days in Los Angeles, at a cooperative warehouse in the Central Valley and in the shelters, and the photograph of her unloading a pallet of bread in a school gymnasium in the San Gabriel Valley is the only picture of a Whitlock minister most of the Realm has seen. The cooperative wing regards it as the vindication of a century’s argument about who can feed people when the state cannot. Nobody objected when the Prime Minister accepted Russia’s rescuers without consulting his Cabinet, and Halvorsen, who was in the Central Valley at the time, said afterwards that she would have done the same.

The count is the Bloc’s. Under the Heads of Agreement the ministry’s first business is the federal enumeration of the Territory of Loreto, which Nyberg’s department is conducting. A Cabinet committee on the Territory, chaired by the Prime Minister himself, with Nyberg at the Federation, Valdez at the Home Office and the Attorney-General, has charge of the enumeration and of the Bill that will follow it. The enumeration is the first count of Loreto’s people by the Realm itself, every previous figure having come from a Mexican census of Mexican citizens taken before the transfer, and the Bloc’s officers say, without much modesty, that it is the only thing the party has ever asked for that it has been given the means to do. Its opponents in AfR, who want the count too, argue that the party which campaigned on it should not run it. The Bloc’s answer is that the count is conducted by the federation’s statisticians, as every enumeration is, and that Nyberg’s job is to see that nobody stops them.

The new intake has not yet been tested. The Bill settling Loreto’s form will be the first vote on which the Bloc’s members must decide what they think about something other than whether the territory should be counted, and the party’s officers have spent October teaching forty-eight members, twenty-nine of them new, what the Bloc has believed for a hundred and sixteen years.

Its position is the one it has occupied for eighty years, with two differences: the largest constitutional question before the Realm is its own, and for the first time it is in the government that would have to answer it. A judgment for the applicants in the Tenants’ Case would extend the Rights Act floor further than any legislature has taken it, and would do so at the instance of a party with about a tenth of the Commons. A judgment against them would end a decade of work and vindicate the wing of the party that never wanted the case brought.

Neither outcome would change the Bloc’s seat count, and the party’s officers say so freely.

Trivia

See also

• Labour and Social Democratic Party, the union left the Bloc has always refused to merge with, from which it took its city seats in 2028
• Alliance 90 / Green Realm, which defends the same trusts, and from which it took city seats in 2028
• The commissioning of Caleb Whitlock, the premier the Bloc’s leader proposed
• Territory of Loreto, whose people the Bloc demanded be counted
• American Rights Act, whose extension to income security the Bloc’s affiliates have asked the Court to find
• Royal American Supreme Court, where the income-security case is reserved
• Economy of the United Kingdom of America, the chartered market order and the public trusts the Bloc defends
• Salt River Project, the chartered trust the Bloc regards as its model

Left and Solidarity Bloc · Political Parties · Institutions & Government · United Kingdom of America